On the wall of David Rabe’s television room, at his home in Connecticut, is a photograph of him as a football player at Loras Academy, the Catholic high school in Dubuque, Iowa, where he was a hard-driving running back and linebacker; in the image, he is being tackled, pushed into the dirt by three opponents. Rabe, now a large, white-haired sixty-eight-year-old with an athlete’s body and a writer’s stoop, writes the way he used to run: at full tilt, instinctively feeling for an opening, then plunging forward into the unknown. “I get a sentence, an idea, an image, and I start,” he said. “I don’t know anything beyond it. I follow it . . .